


Gold and Pearls and Fur for a Dowry

by TiamatsChild



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Supernatural, Canon Era, Community: makinghugospin, Gen, Selkies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-12
Updated: 2013-06-12
Packaged: 2017-12-14 17:28:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/839479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TiamatsChild/pseuds/TiamatsChild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fantine disposes of her wealth. </p><p>Written off the prompt "Fantine is a selkie."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gold and Pearls and Fur for a Dowry

**Author's Note:**

> Written for an anon at makinghugospin at Livejournal, for their prompt: "Fantine is a selkie."

Fantine had thought it would not really mean anything to sell her hair. What was her hair? It would grow back. She would still be beautiful. She would still have her soul, her strong hands, her misty eyes that she had given her daughter. 

But not having her hair meant not having a space for herself. It took time from her. There was no moment in the morning when she combed it loose and bound it up again, arranging it to her whim as she could not arrange the practical, poor clothes remaining to her. There was no moment in the evening when she took out her comb and let her hair spill about her, clothing her in glory instead of crowning her with it. The long smooth strokes of her brush had soothed her, settled peace upon her as they burnished her hair. Without that time, without the ritual, without the small thing that cost her nothing but distinctly belonged to her, she hurt. 

She hurt a very great deal. 

Fantine was accustomed to pain, but this was a new kind. She could not gentle it away. She had nothing to cling to but Cosette and she had hidden Cosette, both the laughing breathing child and, in quite another place, her soul. Cosette’s soul and Fantine’s soul were together, but their bodies were far apart. Fantine could keep her child’s soul safe, but she could not keep her safe in body, not when they were so many miles distant, when Cosette was such a very long way from the sea, or a river, or even a steady stream. 

Fantine thought of her child as she sewed, thought of her child as she made the decision to eat or to wait one more day, thought of her child as she lay down to sleep, cold, the only warm things in her bed her body and her soul and her child’s soul. The days went on that way, and Fantine grew angrier and angrier as the pain never lightened, never let go.  
Until the day a letter from the Thenardiers came. Forty francs. Two Napoleons. Fantine stood on the stairs below her room and read the page over and over. “Forty francs!” she said to Marguerite, who was her neighbor, and who was kind. “Forty francs as if it were nothing and where do they think I can get them!” 

Fantine was laughing. When she was angry, when she was hurting, when she was frightened, Fantine laughed. Marguerite listened, her head tilted to the side. Marguerite was stretched thin by poverty that had lasted longer than Fantine’s (for Fantine’s had lasted all her life save a few years, and so had Marguerite’s, but Marguerite was older) and that thinness, the quality it gave to her, like a thing much loved and now worn served to soften what she said so much that at first Fantine did not understand it. 

“Well, my dear,” said Marguerite, “there are always those furs you have. Fine furs, so beautifully dressed.”

Fantine laughed that moment more and then she stilled, freezing, like an animal who has seen a hunter. “No,” she said. “No,” she said. “No.”

And she ran down the stairs into the sunlight.

 

Once she was out in the open air, standing in the street, she began to laugh again. The idea! Forty francs and “those furs you have,” as Marguerite called them. Fantine had not cried for weeks. She did not cry now. It was too much for crying. She ran, and stopped to whirl about a hitching post, still laughing. 

“What’s the joke?” a passerby shouted to her.

Fantine gasped for breath and shouted back, “Nothing, nothing, it is a country joke, it is only forty francs!”

When she came to the square there was a small crowd, and a man standing above it in the back of a wagon. He was juggling. Fantine looked as she passed, and she was about to go through the square and away, but the people in the crowd were laughing and in the moment Fantine wanted someone to laugh with. So she swung wide and came to the edge of the crowd, and she had someone to laugh with. 

The man was selling sets of teeth, medicines, powders, opiates. Anything any travelling dentist might sell and of course he told jokes too. He was telling them as he hawked his wares, catching people’s eyes and ears as he would not have been able to do if he had only the names of his drugs. He caught a ball he’d been keeping in the air and drew it down with a flourish, and that was when his eyes caught Fantine’s mouth – then met her eyes. 

“You!” he called, and Fantine glanced about, but he was looking at her. “You, girl, who laugh so well, you have pretty teeth! If you’ll sell me your incisors, I’ll give you a napoleon each!” 

“What do you mean by that?” Fantine called back. “What are my incisors?”

“The incisors,” he said, in a professorial tone, as if he stood in the center of an amphitheater rather than the back of a wagon, “Are the two front teeth, top and bottom. I want the ones in your upper jaw.” 

“Oh!” said Fantine, and she threw her right hand up in front of her mouth, so that it hid the white flash as she spoke. “Horrible!”

“What a lucky child she is,” said an old hag who stood by her, who had no teeth herself and faced no prospect of making money at this impromptu market, but only of spending it. 

Fantine whirled, pulling her hands away from her mouth to cover her ears and hold them shut so that she did not have to hear the vendor yelling after her. “Remember, my beauty, if you’re brave enough, I shall be at the inn of the _Tillac d’Argent_! Tonight!”

But even so, she heard him. 

 

Fantine ran up the stairs to the landing she shared with Marguerite, snapped her hands down so they clapped against the rail – it was not violent enough, it was not what she wished to do, she wanted to bite, she wanted to swim and swim and swim until she stopped being able to swim and only floated, only the air in her lungs and the warm roundness of her body buoying her up as she waited her exhaustion through – and ran down the stairs again. She hopped out the door and stood there, in the light that was rapidly becoming slanted and dim. There was so little time in the winter. Light was time and time was light and she twisted her hands into her skirt. She had not used them well today. 

She looked down the street. The way she had come and then – the other way, out to the fields beyond the edge of town. There was little to see, even this far away from the town’s center, because the road bent. There was no straight path. It was an old city, after all. But if she wanted to, she could turn herself to the water like the needle in a compass, like a flower turning toward the sun, even underground, even dying.

She saw the mayor as he turned into her road immediately, because she was looking. He wasn’t lit full on, she could not make out his face, but she did not need to. There was no one else in town who moved that way. Fantine spun, leapt up into the hallway, and shut the door again in one smooth movement. She held it shut, tight against the doorframe, her stomach twisting so taut it hurt. It hurt as if she had not eaten in a week and then took a bite, a pain she’d almost forgotten but remembered when she felt it again. It had been a long time since she was a child. It had been a long time since he was a child.

And yet she always made sure to laugh when she was where he might see, as if they were both children still and she had to show he had not hurt her. Why did she care whether he had hurt her or not, when he assuredly did not care? She did not know. But if he had seen her as she had seen him, what would she have done, and how would she have laughed? She did not know that either.

She went up the stairs again.

 

“He was terrible,” she told Marguerite, as she stood in Marguerite’s door, the only place in Marguerite’s room where even such a short person as she was could stand straight. “Such things should not be allowed. What he said to me! The hair, yes, the hair is nothing, the hair is alive, it will grow back but my teeth -! No, never, it would be horrible, I would be horrible, he was horrible.”

“What did he offer you?” Marguerite asked. She was not paying attention, Fantine was sure. Marguerite often did not pay attention to Fantine, although she was so kind. She treated Fantine like she might treat a pretty child who was not hers. She taught her things, many of them terribly important things, but she did not pay heed to all she said, picking out what she considered the sense from what (she thought) was superfluous if pretty babble. Usually Fantine did not mind, but tonight it twisted at her. She felt she might run. She did not.

“Two Napoleons,” she said.

“That makes forty francs,” said Marguerite.

“Yes,” said Fantine, slowly, slowly, as if she had been in the water a long while, as if she had been marching all day and the words were the burden she had carried, now to be set down. “Two Napoleons make forty francs.”

She went back to her room. She sat on her chair. She folded her hands. She unfolded them. She hid them in her skirt. She twisted her skirt about them until they nearly hurt and then she stood, took the few small steps she could take, moved back, ducked into her bed and pulled out her soul and her daughter’s soul from the worn thing she called her coverlid. They were beautiful, it was true. Cosette’s was still fluffy and white, the kind hunters routinely killed for. It was Cosette’s. It was not for sale. Her soul had speckles, ringed black and white. Not as fine but even so perhaps – they sometimes fetched such a lot of money, and she had never even had a scar where any showed. Only bruises, sometimes. But never any bad scars, never anything you could see – 

But no. Even apart from the horror of it (was that what had happened to her mother? Or was it her father? Was she cast aside when they found their souls again and fled?) it was utterly impractical. Even if she could get enough money for it it would do her and Cosette no good. She would belong to whoever had her soul, she would be bound to them, she would have to do what they said, she would never be able to freely go to Cosette again. She could not protect her, she could not earn money to make others keep her safe. It was impossible. It would do no good. Perhaps she would not even be able to keep Cosette’s soul secret, if she gave her own soul away. Fantine couldn’t be sure. 

There were, however, her teeth. She tapped them with her thumbnail. To sell her teeth would not bind her to anything, and they were, after all, a part of her own body, indisputably hers to do with as she chose. She could, perhaps, for Cosette - !

But if she did that she would have trapped them both. She would never be able to go back to the ocean, never slip into the water for her supper again. Cosette would have to learn alone. What did the top front teeth matter for a human? What could they want with them, other than to look pretty? But for her - 

They were the first teeth that came in. Cosette had gotten them in her time. She needed them, sharp and bright, to latch down on what would escape her, and while Fantine knew she could learn, as Fantine had learned, without a guide it would be slow, it would be long, it would be more than Fantine could bear, even if she learned to change her own habits to make it easier with missing teeth. They were not the eye teeth, after all. She might do it.

No. No. Fantine was not human. Perhaps it was time to stop acting as if she were. 

 

Jean Valjean rarely slept the whole night through. He worked late, went out walking, thought and thought. Slept awhile. Woke again, often from a nightmare. Thought, and thought, and went walking until the sun rose and found him outside of the town entirely. In prison the ability to regulate when he slept and when he woke was one of the few things that remained entirely and completely his own. The freedom he had seized then left its mark on him now.

He was not surprised to wake in the middle of the night, when, in his room over his office at least, there was little human sound, and only moonlight. 

But it was not right, that there should be someone else’s breathing. Jean Valjean, who had been for so long never alone and yet more alone than anyone else in the world, opened his eyes, careful as he could be, slow. 

There was a person, sitting on the edge of his bed at his feet, where light cut through the window in a great slash. Only dim light, far away light, but it caught the silver of the candlestick that person held in their hands, splashed there, made the metal glow. The person at the end of his bed turned the candlestick so that the moonlight curved around it, followed it. Valjean, half mesmerized by the light and by the hour, which he was not accustomed to share with anyone, said, “Do you need them?”

The person did not answer immediately, and Valjean, to whom it had not occurred to be afraid, added, “There is another candlestick. If you need them, they must be yours.” 

“You are sad when you sleep, monsieur,” the person said. A woman’s voice. “Someone has hurt you badly.” 

"It may be so," Jean Valjean said, and levered himself up on his elbow. He was already more than half curled in about his stomach. Like a child in the womb, or a man put into the earth without a coffin - a child again, in a different kind of womb. The thought rippled aross his mind the way the light rippled across the silver, but he did not pursue it. Though it was the sort of thought he often traced over and over at this hour, it mattered less than the woman at the foot of his bed. 

"I thought of hurting you," the woman said, and turned her head. In all these shadows there was nothing but the movement to catch, but Valjean thought he heard a smile tugging between them when she continued. "But I find it has already been done." 

Under most circumstances it would not be a thing to smile at, much less to laugh at, but there in the warmth and the dark, with that smile between them, Jean Valjean chuckled, and meant it kindly. "I have often found that too," he said. "Why did you want to hurt me?"

"You hurt me," she answered. 

Her answer struck him like a fall into cold water, like the shock of the surface closing over his head. He held his breath. 

“It is very painful to be turned off because gossips told stories, you know,” she said. “Because you see, then everyone believes it. And it does not matter what you are, because everyone knows that monsieur will take anyone, so long as they are good. If he will not have you, than you are not honest.” 

“It is hard to live,” she said, “without being thought to be honest.”

“It's true,” Jean Valjean said, a memory of emptiness at his back like a physical thing. He rolled himself up, so that he was kneeling on his feet, and said, “I don't know your story, but I would hear it, if you would tell it.”

She laughed, and that laugh was not altogether a kind one. “I'm sure you do,” she said. “But I will tell you.”


End file.
